Training | 2010.01.17
Increasingly, the rarest experience in family life is undivided attention | Madeleine Bunting
The capacity to listen, and other crucial human attributes, are being diminished by relentless technological expansion
In the two weeks leading up to Christmas, the crisis of environmental sustainability dominated every headline. Since the new year, a number of stories seem to raise disturbing questions about another kind of sustainability: the durability and quality of human relationships, and how we transmit to children the skills and values needed to conduct them. There have been a batch of stories about loneliness; we now have well-established evidence of rising depression rates and increased emotional problems in adolescence. In his fascinating book Loneliness , John Cacioppo, the American psychologist, argues that one-fifth of people are lonely.
There is no shortage of explanations as to the causes of this unhappy fifth. Interestingly, two of the most popular – family breakdown favoured by the right and inequality favoured by the left – were largely ruled out in one of the most meticulous time trend studies of this growing malaise. The Nuffield Foundation\'s groundbreaking work on adolescence , which now spans 1974 to 2004, is unequivocal that young people in the UK now have a "significantly higher level of emotional and behavioural problems than 16-year-olds living through the 70s and 80s". But it dismissed "fractured" family lives as a cause and was clear that "increasing socio-economic inequalities are not the full explanation". It asks: "Has something changed about peer group interactions and non-family socialisation? Do young people spend their time in very different ways compared with their parents\' generation? Do they spend less time with adults? Do we parent differently from families in other countries or differently from the 70s?"
The short answer to all of the above is yes. The most obvious driver of change is new media technology, which is dramatically re-shaping all kinds of human interaction. Raymond Tallis has coined the word the "e-ttenuation" of relationships to describe the consequences: faced with such an abundance of interesting choices, there is a reluctance to commit and a provisionalism which promotes grazing, keeping options open. Above all, there is a paradigm of contractualism: relationships are measured by the question "what\'s in it for me?" It is not technology per se at fault, but how it is used, and in particular how it combines with another equally powerful phenomenon – commercialisation; the assessment that everyone and everything has a price. It is the two combined which I would argue are so corrosive to our capabilities to create and sustain relationships of depth and durability.
Last week\'s report by Jean Gross, an educational psychologist, that one in six children has difficulty learning to speak and listen, is the kind of story which gets likened to the canary down the mine shaft. It follows several reports with similar findings: children are turning up to primary school struggling to construct sentences, according to John Bercow\'s government report in 2008.
The process of listening to someone and responding in speech is the most ordinary everyday task – and the most demanding of social skills. How we read facial expressions, body language and speech to interpret what has been said, and how that expresses relationships, is an immensely complex process. Listening is a huge, much underrated skill, requiring personal preoccupations to be set aside, if only momentarily, in order to be attentive to another.
These skills are among the most important inheritance a parent ever bequeaths; if these are not being transmitted effectively in a significant section of the population, what is going on? Gross pointed to factors such as parents not having enough time with their children because of long working hours, and too much screen-based entertainment. The child needs you, "not expensive toys and big houses", concluded Gross.
Children are spending on average six hours a day in front of screens – either computers or televisions. Interaction with their parents is subject to interruptions from mobiles and BlackBerrys as work spills into private lives. Increasingly the rarest experience in family life is undivided attention, being present as everyone juggles technologies: iPods and Facebook, BlackBerrys and landlines. Family life is no longer private, it\'s porous to all the networks outside it.
IPods can be great, mobile phones very useful, and it\'s handy keeping up with people on Facebook. The problem is the quantity of this connectivity and its potential for addiction – how it is deliberately designed to draw people ever deeper. A majority of people can put boundaries on these pleasures – even Davina McCall, who has presided over a particularly addictive form of reality television, rations TV for her three children, we were told last week. But that requires a form of self-control, and deferred gratification – values which are profoundly counter-cultural and yet which psychologists argue are crucial life skills: you learn them if you are lucky enough to have parents who understand their importance and teach them by example. That\'s a lottery.
The potential damage of the "telemediation" of everyday life is compounded by the fact that so much of screen entertainment is commercialised. It\'s a world increasingly structured around buying and selling; the average viewer sees 43 adverts a day compared with 33 a decade ago. The internet is permeated with desperate, intrusive salesmanship. Adults have slowly been allowed to develop the capacity to deal with advertising; children stumble into these network shopping malls bewildered. With a tin ear for this issue, the culture secretary, Ben Bradshaw, announced last week to howls of outrage that the government will allow product placement in television programmes. Another precious bastion of public space beyond the tentacles of commercialisation is collapsing.
If you want to glimpse how children are being groomed to operate in this commercialised telemediated space, go to Club Penguin. Kids are enthralled by its elaborate world of puffles and dojos; seduced on to a free site, the child is then confronted at every point by options reserved for fully paid-up members. The latter get to decorate their igloos and change the clothes on their penguin avatar. This is a game which trains children to understand how consumerism humiliates and excludes those who can\'t pay.
Children graduate from Club Penguin to Facebook, where adolescents have found a whole new forum for their quest for selfhood. "Who am I, who do I want to be?": these staples of western individualism have found amplification on the net. As an article in the New York Times explored, social networking is curiously addictive as it feeds on adolescent social insecurities. One social scientist argued: "If you\'re watching the social landscape on the screen and if you\'re obsessed with your position in that landscape, it\'s very hard to look away."
This is not a Luddite diatribe against technology, but an argument for how carefully it has to be managed if other human attributes, such as the capacity for commitment, are to flourish. The American academic Robert Putnam, in his influential book Bowling Alone , placed considerable blame on television for the decline in many aspects of civic engagement. We should be watching carefully for how a new generation of media technology might erode another area of relationship – the intimacies of family life, the nursery of our skills to speak, listen and build relationships.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]gy-human-attributes-diminished
